Category: 2010

Launch Season

We are coming to the end of the period unofficially known in the racing world, or the F1 world at least, as ‘launch season’. A year ago I posted a series of articles under the header of Launch Season featuring photos and a brief impression of each of the 2009 F1 cars as well as the Peugeot 908. Obviously this is an F1-specific feature because no other series releases so many brand new cars every single season.

I’ve decided against doing this for 2010 because all I can really do is gawp at the paint schemes and provide team background. I’m not technical enough to point out the nuances of car design and I don’t have the patience to write 11-13 team histories, so rather than rewrite others’ impressions why not just read what I read?

At BlogF1, Ollie takes the ‘team review’ approach, telling us how each has changed since the last race of 2009, makes notes about the 2010 cars and includes some killer shots of the cars. If you’re fairly new to F1 you should have a read of these fully up-to-date team bios to bring yourself up to speed.

At VivaF1, Maverick also has a poke around the cars to see what the design teams have been doing and the pictures there include fascinating back-to-back comparisons to the 2009 models – after viewing only a few shots from different teams you can really see that the 2010 crop are longer to account for the extra fuel weights.

Both blogs attack the subject in an approachable and engaging way which doesn’t leave behind the fan who perhaps wants to know what’s going on, without having to have followed the technical side of the sport before.

If you do want the extra depth there’s F1Technical.net and also Craig Scarborough’s new blog, though these two often look at things in such high detail that I get lost or I don’t really know what I’m looking at.

For once though, it isn’t just Formula 1 cars being revealed at the moment. There are the new IndyCar proposals from Swift, Dallara, Lola and Delta Wing and okay they are just proposals and not actual cars, but there have been plenty of words written about them already. I plan to write something about it myself shortly (that post has been delayed), and I’ll link some of the more interesting articles then.

Write to the Top

The new CEO of the Indy Racing League, Randy Bernard, will be taking his seat in his office on March 1st.

Let’s send him a letter.

This is the new era of fan interaction. Various different series and teams are paying attention to fans more than they ever have done before, whether by survey or direct interaction via Facebook or Twitter. What’ll get his attention on Day 1 better than a stack of letters from the fans? Okay so maybe they won’t reach him, maybe the PR or marketing people will get them – it doesn’t matter, they’ll note the increase in correspondence and hopefully someone will read some of them.

Bernard appears to have a proven record in growing a sporting property from absolutely nothing to something rather much bigger. The IRL/IndyCar needs those skills, badly. Okay, IndyCar has something of a fan base, it has a history and all the rest – but how much of that does he know? He openly admits he’s coming to this raw, no prior knowledge. Let’s tell him what we like about IndyCar, and what we think may need adjusting. We want to make sure he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Before you go any further, be sure to remember to be courteous and polite, like not sniggering at his humourous name, nor ranting and raving like a blogger fool. Nobody wants to receive a note that reads like it comes from the middle of a flame war on a forum or a blog. Pressdog wrote some nice guidelines, let’s stick to those. We should welcome him.

Nothing works better than a bit of paper landing on your desk. It’s more personal.

Here’s his address:

Randy Bernard
CEO, Izod IndyCar Series
4790 W 16th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46222

Now, I’m in the UK and I’m not sure whether I’ll use traditional mail (I probably will). But if it doesn’t float your boat, you can always send an email via the website’s contact form:

http://www.indycar.com/contact/

Give it some thought and send him a note. I’m having a think and I will send something in shortly.

*

If after that you are still in a letter-writing mood, pop along to Vision Racing’s Facebook page to see how you can help them convince existing and potential sponsors to back them and resurrect the team for 2010, before it is stood down completely.

And finally, be sure to VOTE on the chassis proposal you favour. I hope to write about those proposals soon but I’ve found myself short on blogging time recently.

Remember, this is the new era of fans being heard, so make the most of it!

Thursday Thoughts: Your Ideal Team

Thursday Thoughts this week comes from Journeyer who asks:

If you were a team boss with 3 vacant seats (2 race seats and 1 test seat), who would you hire?

If I were a team boss in F1 with an unlimited amount of money, I’d want to pick a fast team of drivers but also ones who will get on well with each other. There is no point having animosity in the team leading to a split within the garage, we saw the damage that did to McLaren.

I would also want two potential race winners, perhaps one faster than the other, who would go for the title while the second can back him up should he falter. That’s not to be confused with a ‘team orders’ situation where the weight of the team is squarely behind one man. I actually think the line-up that would best fit this description exists already, at Red Bull. Vettel is marginally quicker than Webber, who is still under-rated for some reason. They would both be free to win races but I’d lean toward Vettel for the title run, just as the team did last year. If I were picking two guys to work together, I’d pick these two and it just so happens they are already teammates.

There are plenty of reasons why you would hire Hamilton, Alonso, Button or Raikkonen (or even Michael Schumacher). The only one that tempts me from that list is Button, the others just seem like too much hard work, too demanding in terms of preferential treatment. Yes, even Kimi.

My test driver would be an experienced hand who’s had a long career but is maybe looking to gradually find his way out rather than stop dead, and also knows how to set up a car. That’s why I choose Rubens Barrichello. He’d be my ‘third driver’. I’d also keep Anthony Davidson hanging around for testing and development purposes, I want to put him in a race seat and if when running him I find out why Mark is under-rated I can easily slot Ant into the seat.

Being a perfect world I’d move these drivers – and Adrian Newey – to Williams. I am a fan of Williams and it is time they were championship contenders again. Rubens can do his year of racing with them and then can move into testing. Of course, if Nico H turns out to be dynamite I reserve the right to change my mind about any of this.

So that’s who I would pick if my talent pool was restricted to current F1 drivers, but that’s not answering the question completely honestly. If I truly wanted my ideal team I’m going to do something radically different.

I’m going to hire Juan Pablo Montoya and Ryan Hunter-Reay.

Again at Williams because JPM should never have left them, and because Ryan is a born Williams driver if ever I laid eyes on one. Montoya’s never-give-up attitude struck fear into Schumacher himself, and if Michael is back I want Juan back. I’ve always been a fan of Juan, right back to the CART days. I think what he’s achieved in racing is fantastic and is criminally overlooked. Plus his new-found experience of tyre-management in NASCAR, where you have to nurse them, will help massively in the new-look F1 this year.

In the second car, Hunter-Reay is arguably the best road-course racer in IndyCar right now and is American too, which is what F1 needs, and I don’t care if it screws up IZOD’s marketing plan. Have him learn F1 for a year or two and then he can take over the title challenge in the 3rd year after Juan gets bored and does something else. RHR would make a brilliant F1 driver.

F1 2010 – Revised Line-Up as at 1 Feb

I promised in an earlier post back on the old blog (also archived here somewhere) that I would update the F1 entry list as announcements were made. There have been a few changes since then so here is an updated list. Note that there has only been one official FIA Entry List released and that is the one from November, which is considerably out of date now, but then that’s par for the course with these things – I never trust the official lists no matter how much they are refreshed, until early March.

It was great to see the cars on track today! Here’s a short video, check out the ‘More From’ tab at YouTube for a couple more and be sure to return to this guy during the week, he’s brilliant.

Revised Entry List (Unofficial)

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Mercedes Grand Prix
McLaren-Mercedes MP4-25 Mercedes W01
1. Jenson Button 3. Michael Schumacher
2. Lewis Hamilton 4. Nico Rosberg
t. Gary Paffett
Red Bull Racing Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro
Red Bull-Renault RB6 Ferrari F10
5. Sebastian Vettel 7. Felipe Massa
6. Mark Webber 8. Fernando Alonso
t. Daniel Ricciardo, Brendan Hartley t. Giancarlo Fisichella
AT&T Williams F1 Renault F1 Team
Williams-Cosworth FW32 Renault R30
9. Rubens Barrichello 11. Robert Kubica
10. Nico Hülkenberg 12. Vitaly Petrov
t. Valterri Bottas t. Ho-Pin Tung, Jerome d’Ambrosio, Jan Charouz
Force India F1 Team Scuderia Toro Rosso
Force India-Mercedes VJM03 STR-Ferrari STR5
14. Adrian Sutil 16. Sebastien Buemi
15. Vitantonio Liuzzi 17. Jaime Alguersuari
Lotus F1 Racing Campos Meta 1
Lotus-Cosworth Campos Dallara-Cosworth
18. Jarno Trulli 20. tbc
19. Heikki Kovalainen 21. Bruno Senna
t. Fairuz Fauzy
US F1 Team Virgin Racing
USF1-Cosworth Virgin-Cosworth VR-01
22. José Maria López 24. Timo Glock
23. tbc 25. Lucas di Grassi
BMW Sauber F1 Team
BMW Sauber-Ferrari C29
26. Pedro de la Rosa
27. Kamui Kobayashi

EDIT – I’d love to do a list for IndyCar as well but the situation is so volatile at the moment with ‘name’ teams struggling and lots of part-season programmes, its just too hard to follow right now.